Familial Foes?: French-Sioux Families and Plains Métis Brigades in the Nineteenth Century

On July 13 and 14, 1851, in present-day North Dakota, a protracted battle occurred between a large band of Sioux warriors and a Métis bison-hunting brigade from St. François Xavier parish in the Red River Settlement, situated to the northeast in British territory.¹ The Métis had ventured deep into contested Métis-Sioux territory from their home at the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers in search of the large herds that were the basis of both their livelihood and their lifestyle. During the Battle of Grand Coteau, sixty-seven Métis hunters, plus numerous women and children, burdened with two hundred carts, successfully resisted as many as two thousand Sioux assailants. This battle, a defining moment in Plains Métis history immortalized in songs and stories by the victors, showed Métis mastery of the plains and the bison hunts to Northern Plains tribes and whites residing in the Midwest.² This battle is also often used as evidence of a perceived long history of hostility between the Sioux Indians and Plains Métis.³

However, another dimension or point of conversion must be considered in the relations between the nineteenth-century Sioux and Plains Métis populations. Researchers looking at the history of northern North American French-Indian families have placed great focus on the northern Plains Métis population. Visible, powerful, and organized, this population led a highly distinctive mobile lifestyle. Plains Métis proudly called themselves “La Nation"⁴ Partly obscured by this concerted research focus on the Plains Métis are other contemporaneous populations of French-Indian descent. For example, on the very eastern edge of the plains in the Upper Mississippi basin dwelt a relatively large number of families of French and Sioux ancestry. Like the Plains Métis, the Upper Mississippi French-Sioux emerged out of the westward expansion of the Montreal-centered fur trade.⁵ Numbering in the low hundreds by the mid-nineteenth century, they were important players in the Great Lakes and Upper Mississippi fur trade-based society and economy. The presence of this French-Sioux population and that of French-Indians in the Great Lakes was generally referred to by officials throughout the nineteenth century using the collective term “half-breed.” In 1839, in a letter to US president Martin Van Buren, Wisconsin congressional delegate James Doty noted that “throughout the whole of the north-western country, the name of ‘half-breed’ is used—and has been used, for the last fifty years—to designate that class of the population which is of Indian extraction. [French terms] Metif and bois-brulé are also used in the same sense”⁶ Although both the Upper Mississippi French-Sioux and the Plains Métis had common paternal Canadien origins and Catholic religious practices, their historic paths diverged.⁷ This article examines why, unlike the Plains Métis, the French-Sioux population seemingly never developed a clearly distinct identity from either their Sioux or their Canadien relatives. This article also explores why so few documented close ties were forged between the Upper Mississippi French-Sioux and the Plains Métis despite their common French-Catholic fur trade heritage and relative proximity to each other.

The Plains Métis’ distinctiveness and colorful history have led researchers to explore the possibility that other fur trade-contact regions with long-established mixed-descent populations experienced similar moments of ethnogenesis.⁸ In other words, was La Nation truly only a plains-based phenomenon tied to the demands and possibilities of the pemmican and robe trades, or did other geographies and economies in fur trade regions lend themselves to similar processes of orthogenesis? Going beyond the traditional fur trade histories of the Great Lakes and Upper Mississippi basins, researchers in recent years have examined the nature and impact of white Indian relations within these regions.⁹

Jacqueline Peterson and other Great Lakes researchers have argued that while a vibrant fur trade society existed in the Great Lakes and Upper Mississippi regions from the eighteenth century until the middle of the...